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Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto. 1972
David Goldblatt
Artwork 1972
David Goldblatt's monochrome photograph  'Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto. 1972', depicts a uniformed figure restraining a dog in front of a parade in a stadium.
Artwork: David Goldblatt, Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto. 1972 (1972). Silver gelatin print. 32 x 30 cm. Courtesy of private collection.
Artist David Goldblatt Title Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto. 1972 Date 1972 Materials Silver gelatin print Dimensions 32 x 30 cm Edition Edition of 10 Credit Private collection

From Phokeng Tshepo Setai and Alexander Richards, the curators of Exhibition Match '22:

In the early 1970s, Goldblatt documented the residents of Soweto before the 1976 uprising, imaging life for ordinary people in the township under apartheid: its racial segregation and inequity, alongside its moments of joy.

“I was drawn,” the late photographer David Goldblatt wrote, “not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” A preeminent chronicler of South African life under apartheid and after, Goldblatt bore witness to how this life is written on the land, in its structures or their absence. Unconcerned with documenting significant historic moments, his photographs stand outside the events of the time and yet are eloquent of them. Through Goldblatt’s lens, the prosaic reveals a telling poignancy. Even in those images that appear benign, much is latent in them – histories and politics, desires and dread. His photographs are quietly critical reflections on the values and conditions that have shaped the country; those structures both ideological and tangible. Among his most notable photobooks are On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982), The Structure of Things Then (1998), and Particulars (2003).

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